[Chris Childers]

"Organic form" seems to me one of the most protean terms in poetics, in that it can be used to mean more or less what anybody wants it to mean. Though it has its origins in Plato's Phaedrus, the touchstone for its use in literature is Coleridge's distinction between mechanic and organic form in his Shakespearean Criticism. Here is the relevant passage:

No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then is it that not only single Zoili, but whole nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters- as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower?- In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire, save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakespeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material;- as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms;- each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within,- its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror;- and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare,- himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

MH Abrams has observed that Coleridge's distinction is a metaphorical one, rooted in the opposition of machine vs. plant, and that Coleridge's criticism is a virtual jungle of botanical metaphor. Poems spring from seeds, they grow and develop and take in nourishment (from life and literature, presumably, as plants from sun, soil and air) and evolve spontaneously from within, "effectuate their own secret growth," as Coleridge puts it elsewhere. Be that as it may, Coleridge clearly believed that he discerned organic form in Shakespeare's writings, that it was a quality visible in the finished work, not only implicit in the subjective process of composition. He also did not feel it incompatible with traditional form; for him, "organic form" is a principle of organization to supplement, rather than replace, the traditional ones of meter and, sometimes, rhyme.

It seems to me, however, that since Coleridge the idea of "organic form" has been taken up to provide the theoretical backbone for a very different kind of prosody than anything Coleridge would have envisioned. Today it seems to be a kind of free verse, is even referred to, by poets like Denise Levertov and Hilda Morley, as a different (and superior) kind of verse to "free verse." Levertov has said that "most free verse is failed organic poetry," though she later qualifies that statement; according to Morley, "free verse" is "less personal, more public, more like the chanting of voices together," while organic verse "stays close to the poet's personal voice, that inward noise that makes use of intensely personal rhythms." Anyway, in this thread I'm curious about three things:

1. How do Sphereans understand the term "organic form?" Does it simply denote a kind of poetry with which you may or may not have any sympathy, or is it something you strive for in your own work, and if so, what does it mean to you?

2. What poets or critics, in interviews or essays, have written illuminatingly or interestingly about "organic form?" Are there any accounts of it or quotes you've found particularly helpful?

3. What poems (formal or free, classic or contemporary) do you feel have organic form, and what makes their form organic?

Obviously, this topic has affinities both with the thread we just had on depth as well as with the slightly disingenuous and half-hearted discussion of product vs. process over on GT right now. (The problem there is that pragmatic considerations overshadow the theoretical.) It belongs in Mastery because I hope it will involve discussion of individual poems of organic form; I myself will come back at some point and try to show the organic form implicit in Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight."

C